


i'll eat you up, i love you so

by madeverymerry



Category: Sleeping Beauty (1959), Sleeping Beauty (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/F, Second Person, Unrequited, barring that:, creepy unrequited one-sided not quite love, one-sided
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2014-05-30
Packaged: 2018-01-27 15:46:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1716026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madeverymerry/pseuds/madeverymerry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her name is Aurora and she is your greatest treasure; you will never let her go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'll eat you up, i love you so

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago, but considering that Maleficent just came out, this seems an appropriate time to touch it up and post it.
> 
> Note that since I haven't seen Maleficent yet, this isn't based on whatever relationship these characters have in the new movie, but on that from the original '59 movie. I also kept the traditional fairy tale in mind rather than basing it strictly from the Disney film. No Phillip showing up 5 minutes after Aurora falls asleep.
> 
> Title taken loosely from alt-J's Breezeblocks.

She’s an oddly delicate thing, made of gold and rose. Her name is Aurora and she looks like the dawn.

In the days to follow, the other fairies will take credit. They’ll flutter and glitter and pretend to blush, from modesty or shame, but it’s you who lift her slight form off the floor and lay her on the bed. The dusk is flushing hot violet outside the window, but the sun is down. Her hair catches the last strands of light as you arrange it on her pillow.

You know everything—or enough to matter. True love’s first kiss is a silly thing to cure with, but you suppose (and you smooth the golden curls, watching how the twilight light glances off of it) that it is powerful enough, in its own way. But it won’t matter.

Not really.

You leave her with her hair spread like wings on her pillow and her hands folded neatly in her lap. She looks like she’s only sleeping, and you suppose she is—you’d laid your head upon her breast and heard the slow susurrations of her blood, the tranquil beating of her heart—but the sleep will be forever. True love is powerfully nonexistent.

The princess is an important piece of business, but she is not your only piece of business. You are a busy woman. There is a king in a land far away who owes you a debt, and you pay him a visit; a colleague in the ocean requires your assistance with a small affair. She thanks you with a small sea monster, tiny enough to cup in the palm of your hand, which consumes the first small village you rest beside.

But on these errands, you find yourself considering her. The greenish light of sunset on her small, upturned nose, the way it lit the tips of her eyelashes with the color of ash.

You return to the castle of thorns at dawn. There are spiders, spinning their silky webs all across the rooms and halls; they draw the sticky curtains aside for you. You pause a moment outside her room, listening, as if you could hear her soft, even breaths.

She has not moved. Of course she hasn’t; but your chest loosens at the sight of her calm, oblivious face. Not in relief, but perhaps in satisfaction. You have done your work well.

She has not moved, but the sunrise paints her pink and yellow, like a flower. Her name is Aurora and she looks like the dawn; her name is Briar-Rose and she looks like a petal. You settle on the edge of the bed and wipe the dust from her cheeks.

It’s almost a shame, really. You think this as you brush cobwebs from her perfect lips and comb them from her perfect hair. The other fairies gave her beauty and music, and you’ve heard her sing, heard it echoed to you through memory and glass. The endless days here will spoil her, will coat her in muck and dust and the leavings of insects. You twine a curl of gold around your finger; in the light it is molten.

Beauty and music. You’ve gifted her with more—with sleep eternal. She will be beautiful and young forever, Endymion with the face of Eos. You rest your fingers on her forehead and wonder what she’s dreaming.

When you leave, you lay a spell over the princess, so that the dust and cobwebs cannot touch her.

You think of her often. You think of her while you tend your garden and make nightshade tea, while you draw your traveling cloak around your shoulders and ride off to whisper in the ears of kings. You remember her small, somehow knowing smile, and the tilt of her eyelids. Her breathing is deep and even and her blood pulses slow and cool, a prehistoric sea, washing in and out with the heartbeat of the moon.

True love is a falsehood. This is what you know, and you know everything that matters. But you find yourself looking up at the moon, and wondering.

When you visit her again it is high noon. The castle has fallen apart a little in your absence, but the thorns around it spiral higher than ever before. They duck respectfully out of your way. The great-grandchildren of spiders sketch a little bow, and have left the path to the princess’s room quite clear. You step absently on her father’s nose as you ascend.

She is as perfect as ever. Her skin has freckled lightly with the countless days of sunlight, but they’re clean and evenly spread, and they look like rosy stars. You mark out constellations on her nose.

True love is false. You wonder. What does true love mean? What does _love_ mean?

You cannot remember the color of her eyes. You think they are blue. Delicately, you lift an eyelid; they are the dazed blue of a summer day tilting towards autumn.

She is made of flower petals and strung together with thin golden wire. You trace the contour of her jaw and tuck her wind-ruffled hair back around her face. The curtains are rotted away, but you gesture to the spiders, and as you leave you can hear them scuttling to the window to make your princess new drapes.

Days pass without her. They seem colder somehow, all the colors washed out without her skin there to contrast.

But she is not your only piece of business, and she has never been. A country far to the east falls; you are there in time to pick up the pieces and fit them together in a way that suits you. The weak and senseless queen is beheaded in the castle courtyard. Her harder, brutal sister is installed in her stead, with your blessing; no one will deny a dragon.

An uprising in the north; you whisper into the ears of rebellion and watch as they’re felled, man by man. You count the bodies as they’re carried home and lose track somewhere in the four thousands; your ravens feast on flesh and preen blood into their feathers.

And you think of her.

Weeks pass without her. You find yourself in the court of a southern king, who treats you more sweetly than any royal you’ve known. He obviously wants something from you – you have never been naïve and you are certainly not now—but you deign to stay in his court, for a time. He gives you the highest and brightest tower, and when you reject it, the lowest and darkest dungeon. You almost like him, until he asks for your hand in marriage, and then you like him better - raw.

Your mouth still tastes like blood when you take to the sky; the thorny castle to the west has missed you far too long. The sky is the color of eggshells, clouds painting it from edge to edge, and as night falls lightning flashes in the west. You perch upon a mountaintop and listen to the wind.

You return to her at midnight, a full moon beaming down at you and painting everything the color of ice. The spiders are all asleep, but they’ve woven you a carpet, and you tread carefully on this delicate work as you make your way up the steps.

The webbing-curtain they’ve spun her glows with the moonlight; it does not dim her radiance at all. Your previous spell has worked, and she is as clean and fresh as you left her. Her hair has not been ruffled, her dress has not rotted away. You do not think she has stirred, not so much as twitched an eyelid, since you brushed her hair from her face and left the last time.

This time you sit down at the edge of her bed. The ancient mattress rustles beneath you, the aged bedframe creaking gently. Everyone here is young, but everything here is old. You wonder how long it has been.

Her pulse is beating slow and steady in her neck. As you watch her, her eyelids flutter gently; her pearly pink lips part, taking in a slow breath.

True love is a falsehood and true love’s kiss an outright lie. You wonder who would dare to touch her, who would be worthy of putting their lips upon hers and breathing life into her form. It would be like breathing the sun back into the sky, or breathing the flowers into bloom. Who would be worthy?

Would she love them? Slowly, you lean over her, until you can feel her soft, tasteless breaths on your mouth. Would she love you?

In the moonlight, all of her is silver. Endymion with the face of Selene; her name is Aurora Briar-Rose, and she looks like a single tear wept by the moon. She is perfect, and you have preserved her, and she is yours, yours, yours.

There is more of the dragon in you than they know, and your one tear steams on her skin when it falls upon her cheek. You wipe it away gently with the edge of your sleeve, and see the little frown that crumples her brow. With your thumb, you smooth it away, watch her expression settle back into peace.

There is more of the dragon in you than you know. You want to wake her, want to watch her flare into bountiful, beautiful, raw and flaming and glorious life. But if you do, she will go. Endymion never woke, and he never grew old, and he never got tired of his celestial wife.

You have the heart of a dragon. Perhaps this is why you love her. You pull on your skin of serpent scales and twine yourself with her legs, feeling her heat, feeling her warmth. Her name is Aurora and she is your greatest treasure; you will never let her go.


End file.
